The Runic script was historically used to write the languages of the early and medieval societies in the German, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon areas. Use of the Runic script in various forms covers a period from the 1st century to the 19th century. Some 6000 Runic inscriptions are known. They form an indispensable source of information about the development of the Germanic languages. The Runic alphabet is known as the futhark from its first six letters.

Present day knowledge about runes is incomplete. The set of graphemically distinct units shows greater variation in its graphical shapes than most modern scripts. The runic alphabet changed several times during its history, both in the number and shaped of letters it contained. The shape of most runes can be related to some Latin capital letter, but not necessarily with the letter representing the same sound. The most conspicuous difference between the Latin and Runic alphabets is the order of the letters.

Two sharply different graphic forms, the long branch and short twig forms, were used for nine of the sixteen Viking AgeNordic runes. Although only one form is used in a given inscription, there are runologically important exceptions. In some cases, the two forms were used to convey different meanings in later use in the medieval system; thus, the two forms have separate Unicode encodings.

Staveless runes are a third form of the Viking Age Nordic runes, a kind of Runic shorthand. The number of known inscriptions is small, and the graphic forms of many of the runes show great variability. For this reason, staveless runes do not have a separate Unicode encoding, but have been unified with runes of the other forms, usually short twig.

The wide variety of Runic punctuation has been reduced to three distinct characters based on the simple aspects of their graphical form, as very little is known about any difference in meaning between marks that look different. Other punctuation has been unified with shared punctuation elsewhere in the Unicode standard.

Runes were used as symbols for Sunday letters and golden numbers on calendar staves used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages. To complete the number series 1 to 19, three additional calendar runes were added.